Douglas Huebler, born in 1924, in Ann Arbor, Michigan and died in Cape Cod, Mass in 1997, is considered to be the founder of conceptual art.

After serving in the U.S. Marines during World War II, he studied at the Académie Julien, Paris, and Cleveland School of Art (now Cleveland Institute of Art). He later received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1952 and 1955 respectively. Beyond his renown as an artist, Huebler was also an influential teacher, with stints at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio; Bradford College, Haverford, Massachusetts (1957–73); and Harvard University (1973–75), Cambridge, Massachusetts. He also served as dean of the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (1976–88).

In the 1960s, Huebler situated his oeuvre within the concept of the gestalt, where the work of art exists in direct relationship with the viewer and acts as a link to the rest of the world. Huebler is best known for his incorporation of photographs alongside text, paint, and other media to break down traditional artistic associations with photography.

In the early 1960s, Huebler moved toward Conceptual practice when he became interested in Hard-edge and reductive painting. He began to view his works not simply as two-dimensional illusions, but as three-dimensional objects in their own right. Heavily influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Minimalist artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris, Huebler began to think of the work of art not only in relation to the viewer, but also in terms of its existence beyond the physical object itself. Huebler believed that the work should function as a springboard for contemplating larger ideas.

During the late 1960s Huebler started to incorporate photographs into his Conceptual works. He often paired text with images in order to examine such concepts as commodity fetishism and invite viewers to reexamine their notions of visual culture. He also used his work to challenge photography’s documentary capabilities. Starting in 1970 and until his death in 1997, he worked on an ambitious project to “photographically document the existence of everyone alive,” exhibited in 1971 as Variable Piece #70. The work collects portraits of tens of thousands of subjects, photographed mostly in the street, but sometimes posed against a plain background while holding up a sign that reads “One person who may be culturally dislocated.” Along with the photographs, Huebler included typewritten texts, statements of purpose, and lists characterizing the subjects. The project was never fully completed; however, the artist’s goal to reveal the limits of the camera as a documentary tool was successful.

Huebler’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe. His solo shows include t the Phillips Gallery, Detroit (1953), along with retrospectives at the Palais des beaux-arts, Brussels (1994); Camden Arts Centre, London (2002); Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (Mamco), Geneva (2006); and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2012). Selected group exhibitions include Documenta, Kassel, West Germany (1972) and A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968.